Amazon is one of the most admired companies in the business world, according to Fortune magazine. Although it’s a successful business, what fascinates leaders everywhere is its culture. You heard about Leadership Principles, PRFAQs, 6-page memos, Two-Pizza Teams, and Two-Way Door vs. One-Way Door decisions. Combined, these are called the Amazon Peculiar Way. That’s what drew me to experience it from the inside.

In this article, I’ll go into more details about Amazon’s writing culture based on my recent experience at the company. I’ll explain the culture, the artifacts, and the process involved in those, including the use cases. I provide a list of the common documents and what they mean. We’ll also talk about the Amazon writing style that I called Precise Writing. We’ll wrap it up with common downsides and problems.

Reading vs. Writing

You can’t have a writing culture without having a reading culture. It sounds so obvious, but people don’t account that for each document, there will be ten times more people reading it than writing. In other corporate cultures, people prepare long documents or writing comprehensive emails, yet, people don’t read it or simply skim it. There is value for the author to write to think even if nobody will read it, but you can’t have a full writing culture without embracing deliberate reading.

There are benefits to have people reading a document.

  1. Self-paced: When you read a document, you can re-read the portions you didn’t understand. Pause and go find the definition of a word or acronym, or jump back to a paragraph after reading conflicting information. Basically, your ability to comprehend the information dictates the pace you read.
  2. Shared Context: In a project or meeting where people are reading the same information, it requires fewer interruptions of the discussion flow because someone was out-of-sync with the rest of the group. Regardless if it’s an internal or external document, people have a shared starting point for the conversation.
  3. Reference: Documents provide a historical reference for the context in which they made a decision. People go back to that document and re-read it if needed. A culture that also documents changes will also have a record of those decisions. It helps later work streams to understand the decisions.
  4. Onboarding: In any type of project, you’ll have people leaving and joining. They are new hires, an internal transfer, or someone from another function that was looped in to provide feedback (e.g., the legal team). Onboarding through documents allows the person to catch up to what is the context, the decisions, and the directions without having to rely on people remembering to provide the full context. They can also do it alone, without requirement interrupting people's work with meetings.

There are other benefits, but you get the gist.

Amazon Reading

Amazon has its own reading practices. Ironically, “Reading at Amazon” is not well-documented and there isn’t much training or educational materials. However, there is tribal knowledge that spreads from person to person.

Basically, there are two types of reading. The one you do it by yourself, and the one you do it in meetings. Although people have heard about the silent reading at meetings (see Jeff Bezos 2017 shareholder letter)—it’s as awkward as you are thinking—the reading by yourself also has special elements to it.

What they both have in common is that you are reading not as a checkbox exercise, but to comprehend and think critically about the content. When someone asks you to read a document, they are not expecting you to study it to be quizzed later. They are expecting you to read it and raise any concerns from your perspective. What makes you nervous? What’s not feasible or viable? Is the customer value clear? What evidence (data) do you have to help the document become robust? Is it clear enough?

The in-meeting reading adds another layer. The debate will follow the silent reading at the beginning of the meeting. In many meetings, there is no context setting. The meeting owner hands out a printed document (that’s infrequent nowadays) or a link to the digital version. People arrive in a room (physical or online) where everyone is quietly reading. For a six-page document, people read it for 20-25 minutes. For a one-page document, about 5 minutes. That includes time for you to read, highlight items for clarifications or commenting, take notes, etc.  

In 90% of the meetings, the meeting organizer will provide a document. And, in 90% of those, they wrote the document specifically for that meeting. A software engineer might write a three or four paragraphs about a technical challenge with a database to set the stage. People join the meeting, read the document, and then start the discussion. This goes all the way to the top. Meetings with executives to decide or review a project are always backed by a document.

Reading vs. Listening

The contrast of a reading culture is a “passive listening” culture. One where someone is presenting a slide deck or giving a monolog, and the audience is being lectured. As someone wisely said it to me, presentations are a “push” model, while feedback on a document is a “pull” model.

There are many issues with that lecture/push format, and I won’t go into details, otherwise this article would be too long. Let’s make a few statements that we can agree are true:

  1. The presentation skills of a person should have no bearing on the value of the information (it’s true for reading, not true for listening).
  2. The presenter (seniority, authority) should have no impact on the perceived accuracy and truthfulness of the information (it’s true for reading, not true for listening).
  3. The ability to accurately retell what the information you received to someone else shouldn’t be impacted on your ability to recall key details (it’s true for a document, not true for a presentation).

Now that we got the reading part, let’s talk about the writing.

Six-Page Memos

The history of the Six-Page Memo is interesting. It dates back to the early 2000s, when Amazon was not only growing fast, but launching, deciding, and operating a multitude of new initiatives. The capacity of the executive team to keep up with everything that was happening, what required their input, and to maintain context across conversations that were weeks or months apart became an issue. The Working Backwards book by Colin Bryar and Bill Barr does an excellent job at going into the history of it.

The six-page length was the sweet post after much trial and error, according to Colin and Bill. Bezos and the SVPs found it to be long enough for depth, and short enough to force clarity.

That meant that PowerPoints are banned at Amazon. Well, not exactly. People use PowerPoints in large team meetings (All Hands, Town Halls) and in cases where the goal is to present to a group of people, not to evoke a discussion. I will spare you about discussing the problems with presentations. Suffice it to say that they lead to shallow thinking, incoherence, and they make it hard for information to spread accurately to those who weren’t present.

Types of Six-Pages

The Six-Page Memo is not a framework. It’s an approach to write up to six pages of narrative to assist in the discovery of information, the current state of a business, product, or project, review past performance (or incidents), and debate and decide on future work. Amazon has a library with over 15 unique frameworks it uses—all narratives.

These are the popular ones:

PRFAQ — Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions — This is the most well-known outside of Amazon. It’s the framework that’s used in the Working Backwards approach by Amazon. PRFAQs are future-looking and focus on vision and strategy.

WBR/MBR/QBR — Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly Business Reviews — These are frameworks to present information about the current state of the business, product, or project. Not all teams use all variations and it really depends on their needs. These documents are always preceded by a table called Page0 (Page Zero) that contains the key metrics being tracked.

OP1/OP2 — Operating Plan 1 and Operating Plan 2 — These are used for annual planning. These plans describe the vision and strategy for the year. They include a streamlined executive summary of the key PRFAQs that will be funded and implemented. Although the OP1/OP2 are six-page narratives, the bulk of the work is about financial modeling supporting the document.

3YP — Three-Year Plan — The 3YP are long vision documents. They provide not only a vision and the foundations of a strategy for an initiative, but they also include comprehensive financial analysis of the cost and opportunity. These are often used to justify very large bets, from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, in the hope of increasing revenue or reduce expenses.

CoE — Correction of Error — Besides the PRFAQ, I think CoE is the other document that has been adopted by other organizations. This narrative is used to capture information about an incident that impacted customers. They will include a collection of facts that lead to the incident, how it was discovered, what was the impact for the customer, and recommendations on how to avoid them in the future.

Promotion — Yes, there is a structured framework in narrative format for a manager to justify a promotion for an employee. These include information about the business requirement, the employee's performance, and evidence provided by senior peers on why this person should be promoted and why they shouldn’t be promoted.

Team Charter — A document to describe a new organization design or a re-org proposal. It starts with the customer and why this organization structure will deliver more value to them. It includes the work for the team, their responsibilities, and key areas of ownership.

Plain Narratives — When none of the existing templates work, there is a baseline document that provides a simple structure to talk about anything. The first section is the purpose (why we are having this conversation and what we are trying to do), followed by the structure that meets the need of the purpose.

When I was doing research for the PRFAQ Framework book, I interviewed over twenty ex-Amazonians to understand what they implemented in their new organization. They didn’t know I was writing a book about PRFAQ since I didn’t want to bias their answers. The two that most people took with them were PRFAQs and WBRs. I’d add CoE as the third Amazon framework that I believe every business should be learning about.

One bit of information that surprises people is that documents on Amazon don't include the name of the author or the people who contributed to the writing. That's a simple tactic to remind people to focus on the ideas and information, and not the credentials of the author(s).

Besides these in-house frameworks, Amazon also uses narrative writing for other documents that are standard across the tech industry, such as Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), One-Pagers, Technical Design Docs, Marketing/GTM plans, etc.

Precise Writing

The writing that Amazon does differs slightly from other organizations writing. Amazon has specific guidance—and resources, training, and tools—on how to write these narratives. First, it’s important to understand the six-page memo is not a single narrative from top-to-bottom. They are broken down into sections. For example, the PRFAQ has the press release, which is one narrative, and the FAQs, each representing its own narrative. It’s not as daunting as people think.

The crux of precise writing is to be deliberate, clear, concise, and use data. If you joined the PRFAQ Newsletter, you are already receiving weekly Precise Writing Wednesday content where I explain how to do it well.

Here are a few aspects to write with precision:

  1. Remove redundancy
  2. Avoid jargons or elaborate language
  3. Remove ambiguity (e.g., spell out acronyms or abbreviations if they might lead to confusion)
  4. Use clear notation and unambiguous presentation of numbers and dates
  5. Eliminate weasel and squishy words
  6. Use data and evidence
  7. Don’t disguise assumptions and hypothesis as facts

As part of the Amazon style guide, there are other things that you avoid as much as possible in these documents: tables, diagrams, bullet points, or visual aids. These aren’t forbidden, but people use them as a crutch to avoid writing the narrative.

Who Does the Writing?

The expectation is that writing is part of being an Amazonian. For senior roles and above (L6+), Amazon requires a writing sample as part of the job interview. By the time someone has five or more years of work experience, they will write many docs at Amazon—even if it’s a doc between them and their manager.

In the context of businesses, products, or projects, the Single-Threaded Leader (STL) writes the documents. In some cases, such as a WBR/MBR/QBR, it is a person on the team who aggregates and creates the cohesive narrative across initiatives. Some teams even rotate the function to help people develop their writing skills, the understanding across groups, and to gain visibility as they seek the data and information to include.

The Benefits of a Writing Culture

I briefly mention some benefits of reading: self-paced comprehension, shared context, reference, and onboarding. There are more benefits of embracing writing and reading as part of the organization's culture.

Writing is a powerful form of critical thinking. It requires you to find a coherent set of choices and have clarity on how to articulate it to others. The clarity, or the lack of clarity, forces you to ask questions about what you don’t know and how confident you are about it. Writing also helps the author learn how to verbally articulate what’s in the document.

There are second-order benefits as well:

  1. A reading/writing culture will have fewer misunderstanding across team members because the document carries the information.
  2. A reading/writing culture will have fewer misalignments on their projects because people will have a better shared context and a reference to go back to.
  3. A reading/writing culture reduces decisions based on gut-feeling and seniority, and focuses on facts and merits.
  4. A reading/writing culture will also benefit from the adoption of LLMs. The more content an organization can feed its internal LLM, the better answers it'll provide.

The Downside

As with everything else, you can overdo, weaponize, and misuse any principle or approach. A reading/writing culture, even on Amazon, is no different.

First, people might put too much emphasis on the perfection of the text instead of the message they are carrying. This happens because an employee wants to impress a manager or an executive. It's also the case where people are obsessed with their own writing and hold too high of a bar. I’m asked about what types of project warrant a PRFAQ or not, and my answer is to right size the overhead based on project length and potential impact/risk. The time you spend in any writing needs to be proportional to what you are aiming to achieve with it.

Second, an excessive focus on documentation leads to its weaponization. An example is when an executive doesn’t want to pursue a project and spins off a couple of people to spend the next weeks (or months) writing a document they will reject later—a PRFAQ, a Team Charter, a PRD, etc.

Lastly, people might confuse the document for the work. Sadly, I’ve seen this happening by misguided executives or managers. The results of an initiative is the goal, not the document. This often comes attached to a lack of execution since people are focusing on “telling” instead of “showing.”

Conclusion

Organizations already have a kernel of a reading/writing culture. It happens in emails, Slack, Jira, and poorly formatted/organized documents. The difference is to be deliberate about it and take steps toward better writing. An organization that embraces writing and reading is embracing clarity, truth-seeking, and merit-based collaboration.

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